Author Archives: Robert B. Tucker

About Robert B. Tucker

Robert B. Tucker is a globally recognized business futurist and president of The Innovation Resource Group in Santa Barbara, California. He has advised clients in 54 countries and authored eight books, including the bestsellers Managing the Future and Driving Growth Through Innovation. Tucker’s insights have guided organizations from IBM, Citibank, and American Express to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Dubai government. As one of the founders of the Innovation Movement, Robert has appeared on Bloomberg, Channel News Asia, Network 18 India, PBS, and was a featured guest on the CNBC series The Business of Innovation. A regular contributor to Forbes.com, Robert’s latest book is Build a Better Future: 7 Mindsets for Navigating the Age of Acceleration.

Reclaiming a Vision of a World That Works

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Reclaiming a Vision of a World That Works

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

If it feels to you like the world has shifted into overdrive of late, you’re not alone. As a futurist, I observe that we’ve crossed over from the familiar Information Age and have entered the Age of Acceleration. Since COVID, the pace of change has become exponential, rather than linear, increasing at an ever-increasing rate.

In the next ten years, we will experience more change than in the past hundred. That’s not hyperbole; it’s the reality of compounding and converging technological, geopolitical, social, and environmental forces.

These MegaForces of Change are rewriting the future in real time. They are creating new winners and losers, reshaping industries and institutions overnight. They are exposing how ill-prepared we are to navigate the whitewater rapids just ahead.

At such an inflection point in human history, it’s easy to feel powerless. It’s natural to feel as if events are happening to us rather than because of us. But that’s why I wrote Build a Better Future: 7 Mindsets for the Age of Acceleration.

After three decades advising corporate managers around the world on strategies for driving growth through innovation, I’m shifting my practice. My new passion is to accelerate human flourishing in light of this accelerated age. My goal is simple: I want to assist not just managers but everybody to regain a sense of agency, purpose, and hope amidst the biggest deluge of change we’ve experienced in our lifetimes. In short, I aspire to change the direction of humanity by helping people change their mindset.

The World Is Changing — But So Can We

Yes, the world is changing crazily, but here’s the good news: the same forces that threaten to destabilize us also contain the seeds of renewal and abundance. From my research with hundreds of innovators, entrepreneurs, and futurists, I’ve found that what separates those who flourish from those who falter isn’t intelligence, resources, or position — it’s mental hygiene.

Among the seven mindsets I explore in Build a Better Future, two feel especially urgent today.

The first is the Preparedness Mindset — the discipline of scanning the horizon, challenging assumptions, and thinking several moves ahead. Prepared leaders don’t wait for the next crisis; they actively anticipate it. They train themselves and their teams to see weak signals of change before they become tidal waves.

When you start thinking like a futurist, something remarkable happens: you start thinking about the direction, implications, threats, and opportunities in change. You begin to see the connections between events rather than reacting to them one headline at a time. You learn to differentiate signals from noise. You stop being a passive consumer of the future and start proactively shaping it.

The discipline of forward-thinking prepares you to make decisions, manage risk, and allocate your attention to what matters most. You begin to pounce on opportunities earlier, adapt faster, and feel less anxious because you have a framework for making sense of the chaos. The future stops being an abstraction — and becomes something you influence, moment by moment.

From Overwhelm to Agency

The second mindset is what I call the Human Agency Mindset. As A.I. grows ever more capable, the winners will be those who focus on nurturing what makes us uniquely human: our empathy, creativity, moral judgment, and the ability to imagine future possibilities no machine can conceive.

We now possess technologies that our ancestors could scarcely imagine. We can split atoms, edit genes, and train machines to mimic human cognition. But as technological capabilities soar, our wisdom capabilities have lagged. The real question isn’t whether we can unleash a certain technology, but whether we should, and what the implications are. How to ensure that progress serves humanity, not the other way around, will be a huge issue going forward because we can’t outsource wisdom. We must cultivate it. The danger isn’t that AI will become “smarter” than us — it’s that we’ll stop exercising our own capacity for creative thought and reflection.

Reclaiming Our Dreams

At the book launch party in Santa Barbara, I told a story about starting as a young journalist working from a tiny San Fernando Valley apartment. It was so small, the joke was you had to go outside to change your mind. But I didn’t mind because I was on fire with how journalism allowed me to subsidize my curiosity. I interviewed and profiled the visionaries and thought leaders of that era, and the experience of being around these tomorrow-builders changed my life. The big thing I became aware of was the importance of mindset in realizing your potential, and in turning visions into reality.

Today, 40 years later, I believe we all need new mindsets for what’s ahead. We need loftier visions that transcend fear and fatalism and misinformation. We need to reclaim a vision of a world that works for all — a world where technology amplifies human creativity, where wisdom keeps pace with innovation, and where we dare to believe that we can solve even the most vexing problems.

With a new set of mindsets, we can see that our best days lie ahead. That our children and grandchildren are not resigned to live lives of quiet desperation. With renewed mindsets, we can believe that nothing about the future is written in stone. The future is what we make it. It’s not something to fear or flee from. It’s something we can build — one mindset, one decision, one act of imagination at a time.

Robert Tucker Webinar November 2025

Image credits: Pexels

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Get Ready for the Age of Acceleration

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How Preparing to Climb Mt. Everest Can Help You

Get Ready for the Age of Acceleration - Doug Burbank

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

The phone rang in geologist Doug Burbank’s office at the University of Southern California. A climbing buddy was calling to ask if he wanted to join an expedition that was shortly to climb Everest. Impulsively, even though he had a full teaching schedule, a wife, and two young daughters, Doug said, “Count me in.”

What Doug did next to prepare for the adventure of a lifetime will amaze you. It’s a story I’ll share at the Pacific Coast Futures Retreat on May 2nd, in Santa Barbara, and it will help you deal with the uncertainty and volatility of the Age of Acceleration and constant disruption just ahead.

Doug realized that, living in Los Angeles, frost is rare. His body was not ready. He began researching the question: “How do I prepare my body to live in subzero temperatures day after day?” Add to this challenge the fact that Doug suffers from acrophobia – fear of heights. He needed to mitigate this potentially immobilizing condition – and fast! Doug’s innovative solutions will surprise you (e.g. “Put your hands in a bucket of ice water for ten minutes a day for two weeks to acclimate the body,” etc.).

Doug Burbank’s strategies have great relevance to the Everest before all of us: how to prepare for a world where the rate of change is increasingly exponential and never before experienced in human history?

In virtually every realm of our lives, the forecast is one of increased volatility and uncertainty. From energy to A.I. to unbridled technology. From medical breakthroughs to social media, to the rapidly warming climate. These forces will disrupt millions who are not prepared. They will create new winners and losers. They will influence markets. They will drive consumer and voter and social behavior. And they will challenge us as never before to look and think ahead of the curve, to mine the lessons of history, to unleash human agency and vision to shape the future we want rather than the one we inherit by default.

Over the next ten years, there will be more change than over the past 100 years. The divide will grow between those who “get it” and those who don’t. Between those who watch changes envelop them and toss them around and those who take calculated risks to create their own reality.

My friend Doug Burbank knows the secrets of how to adapt to new environments and come out alive. The Pacific Coast Futures Retreat will be a day of learning and discussion about the overdrive future. At this powerful, one-day gathering of forward thinkers from the world of business, academia, government, and the non-profit sector, the focus will be on understanding and mapping the emerging terrain. We will master the necessary “navigational skills” that will alert us to threats and unleash the creativity to discover and seize the opportunities that change brings about.

Pacific Coast Futures Retreat Banner

If you want to develop new navigational mindsets that will enable you to thrive and prosper no matter what shape the future takes, and if you seek to become indispensable to your organization, family, community and to play an outsized role in shaping the future for the common good, please join us by registering here.

Image credits: Robert B. Tucker, Doug Burbank

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What Innovators Can Learn From the Spectacular Rise and Crash of Theranos

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Including its CEO Elizabeth Holmes

What Innovators Can Learn From the Spectacular Rise and Crash of Theranos

Last week in a Silicon Valley courtroom, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was convicted on four counts of fraud in connection with the failed blood-testing company she founded in 2003. The Stanford dropout will soon be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison. She joins a long list of convicted fakers that includes Bernie Madoff, Jeff Skilling, John DeLorean, and many others.

For most observers, the question now is how Holmes got so far, so fast. But for innovators everywhere, I want to focus on a different question: what can we learn from this case study of innovation gone bad?

As an innovation author and trainer to corporate America, I see this as a tragedy for future startups, and the field of innovation.

From the beginning, I followed the amazing rise and spectacular fall of Theranos. At its zenith, the firm soared to a $9 billion valuation. When articles appeared on Elizabeth’s achievements, I was dazzled. Here was a young woman who’d had the gall to drop out of college and start a company that promised to change the game in healthcare.

Theranos invented the nanotainer, which collected blood through a simple, painless finger prick. Several drops of blood could then be tested by another Theranos invention, the Edison. Capable, according to company literature, of performing “hundreds” of separate tests, from standard cholesterol checks to AIDs and leukemia. “The results are faster, more accurate, and far cheaper than conventional methods,” crowed Wired Magazine in a 2014 cover story.

If only it were so. As the 18-week trial revealed, it was all smoke and mirrors.

The Edison was never able to perform any blood tests reliably. But instead of coming clean, Holmes chose to double down and lawyer up. In the book Bad Blood, Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou detailed how Holmes went extreme. She harassed, threatened, and tried to silence internal whistleblowers. Carreyrou was pilloried before the Theranos staff and threatened by Holmes’ attorney and company stakeholder David Boies. Yet his damaging reporting led to Theranos’ unraveling. He carefully documented how Holmes and COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani resorted to using conventional test equipment behind the scenes, while pretending to patients and investors that Edison had performed the work.

As the story of Theranos now fades into history, what can be learned from this rare, behind-the-scenes insight into the amazing rise and fall of a startup that might guide the innovation efforts of others? What did Holmes get right, and where did she go wrong?

Innovators need to believe in themselves and think big, and they need self-discipline. Holmes had these attributes in spades. As a journal she kept revealed during the trial, Holmes kept up a grueling personal development regimen: “4 a.m. rise. Thank God, exercise, meditation, prayer. Eat breakfast Eat breakfast of whey and banana. Get to office by 6:45.”

Young and inexperienced in business, she apparently disciplined herself to speak in a deep and unemotional voice to make her seem older and more credible. She wore turtleneck sweaters to subliminally get people to think she might just be the second coming of Steve Jobs, her hero.

She made mentors of people like Larry Ellison and big-name investors like Tim Draper, who in turn helped convince big-name investors like the DeVoss family, the Cox family of Atlanta, and Rupert Murdock, who lost $125 million in the collapse.

Holmes’ was ultra-tough on herself to keep upping her game: “I am never a minute late,” she wrote in one entry. “I show no excitement. [I am] ALL ABOUT BUSINESS. I am not impulsive. I know the outcome of every encounter. I do not hesitate. I constantly make decisions and change them as needed. I speak rarely. I call bullshit immediately.”

Yet the one person she failed to call it on was herself.

And once she edged down that path with little lies, little deceptions, she got trapped into telling bigger and bigger lies. “Our equipment is already in use by the U.S. military on battlefields,” she promised would-be investors. It wasn’t. She was particularly good at establishing credibility, and somehow managed to charm such luminaries as Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and James Mattis to serve on her board of directors, along with not a single scientist nor medical doctor who might have red-flagged problems with the Edison. (It is amazing that General Mattis apparently didn’t bother to check out the false claim that the military was already piloting the product on battlefields).

Holmes knew how to deflect when her offering proved vulnerable. Every good sales professional knows to “overcome objections.” But whenever visitors started asking her questions that were too close to the Big Lie (the product had major flaws), she aggressively pushed back with, “don’t ask us to reveal trade secrets.” While this shut them up, it did not solve her problem.

Another tool of innovators trying to build the buy-in for their ideas is to use the “fear of losing out” technique. There’s nothing unethical about it, unless you misrepresent facts. This strategy worked well for Holmes – at least for awhile. She used it successfully to secure big contracts, and big investments.

But the lie that did her in was a false attempt to demonstrate credibility. Before the jury, she admitted adding the logos of drug companies Pfizer and Schering-Plough to a marketing pitch to Walgreen Drugstores, at the time considering partnering with Theranos to install instant blood-testing centers in its 9,000 retail locations.

Final lesson to innovators: use creativity to make your case, but don’t fudge even on the smallest details. What Elizabeth did with the logos became a charge of wire fraud and was said to be the smoking gun that all jurors agreed on should send her to prison.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow

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Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

Ten years ago, frigid temperatures in Texas caused rolling blackouts, and millions lost power. The state was warned to weatherize its power grid to prepare for more extreme weather but never got around to it. Then, in February of this year, plummeting temperatures again caused widespread outages. Nine hundred people died, mostly from frostbite. Members of ERCOT, the state’s “electricity reliability board” resigned.

What happened – or failed to happen — in Texas is emblematic of how we come to make decisions in a period of ongoing crisis. ERCOT’s failure to act on clear evidence of what needed to be done to avert future disaster is an all-too-common reaction in today’s disrupted age. We kick the can down the road. We cross our fingers and hope we’re not in charge when events hit the fan.

But the issue is not just how we mitigate or don’t mitigate risk. It is also about how leaders manage and plan for future opportunity.

Texas’ power grid reliability managers failed to weatherize. But the times we are living in demand that we futurize our thinking in order to avert future disasters, but also foresee future ways to add value, serve customers, and build new markets that don’t even exist today.

From pandemic to the dastardly attack on the US Capitol to a steady barrage of climate change-emboldened floods, wildfires, and hurricanes, we all seem to be suffering from Disaster Fatigue. Faced with too many warnings — and the need to make too many decisions — it’s easy to allow our thinking to lapse into what I call Defeatist Mode, and essentially shut down our Idea Factories.

To ward off Disaster Fatigue and get the creative juices flowing again, I recommend that you and your organization consciously start spending more time thinking about tomorrow. I call this process Managing the Future, and it involves managing a cultural shift from present circumstances to the future state we want to make manifest.

Manage the Future Manage the Shift

How to Manage the Shift

Economist Rudy Dornbusch once observed that things often take longer to happen than we think they should. But then they happen faster than we ever thought they would. That’s the sense I get as I have returned to the lecture circuit this fall and have spoken with dozens of leaders about where we are right now.

There’s a growing sense that Covid 19 is not going to go away completely for the foreseeable future. Instead, we are moving from Pandemic to Endemic (in other words the virus and its variants will still be with us, but enough people will have been vaccinated or become immune such that a semblance of normalcy returns).

During this period, leaders especially need to consciously shift attention away from a crisis management mentality and towards an emphasis on managing tomorrow’s potentiality.

As I see it, this is exciting news. For those willing to engage with the future, there is a wide-open field of opportunity. Never has there been a greater need for those with a vision of positivity as regards the future.

A recent survey conducted by Lancet, the British medical journal, found that 45 percent of Millennials in ten countries surveyed are so worried about climate change that it affects their daily life and functioning. So often the prevailing attitude is “we’re doomed.”

“As a young person, when you see a trend coming down the pike, you know it’s going to hit you,” writes Sara Kessler, in Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work. No generation is allowed to sit out the future, and right now the 71 million strong Millennial Generation has decisions to make about Climate Change for which there will be no “do-overs.”

Yet even with climate disasters increasing at an increasing rate, history tells us that our attitude and belief in a more positive future determines more about outcomes than any other factors. We can muster the brainpower to invent and unleash massive climate-cleansing innovations that keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees centigrade, but only if we believe we can.

To do so we must choose optimism over pessimism. We can choose optimism in the face of headlines that declare we’re doomed as a species. We can form study groups and tiger teams to look farther out and contemplate how our industry is changing, how our employee’s expectations are changing, how our customers’ needs are changing, and in doing so we can choose to think positive thoughts.

As we think, so we become. By consciously taking charge of our “self-talk” we can make the shift from defeatist, reactive, and crisis-driven thinking to deliberate, purpose-driven, future-focused thinking.

For those with an eye on their attitude, who monitor emerging technologies and social, demographic, and economic trends there are fewer surprises, fewer blindsides, and greater opportunities to own the future.

As Fleetwood Mac sang:

“Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow
It’ll be better than before…
Open your eyes and look at the day
You’ll see things in a different way”

Image credits: Robert B. Tucker, Pexels

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Weighing the Effectiveness of a Leader

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Weighing the Effectiveness of a Leader

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

As a college student, I was a volunteer on Joe Biden’s initial race for U.S. Senate. I recalled him saying something like, “If I’m elected, come see me in Washington.” Twenty or so years later I did just that. I put Biden to the test.

It was after a speaking engagement in Washington, D.C. I was about to head to the airport when I spotted the majestic Capitol dome in the distance. I remembered Biden’s promise. I had the cabbie to take me over to the Senate Office Building wherein the Delaware senator’s receptionist dutifully passed along my request.

Moments later a smiling and familiar figure appeared. The senator shook my hand and barely slowed down long enough to usher me to accompany him over to the Senate floor where he needed to cast a vote. We visited on the tram back and forth, and shortly we were back at his office, whereupon he thanked me for my service and disappeared.

Brief though it was, Biden passed my little test. He kept his word. He walked his talk. It was just that simple, yet I never forgot it.

I recall that incident from long ago because right now because it seems that leaders everywhere are being put to the test. Constituents, employees, and everybody else is asking tough questions about the competence and character of leaders.

As an innovation coach and public speaker, I’ve had a 35 year ringside seat to observe leadership in action. Working in 54 countries, and in every state and with businesses and trade groups of every size and industry, I’ve seen examples of great leadership that inspired me no end. I’ve worked with top teams of businesses in Rome, Charlotte, Bangkok and Abu Dabi. I’ve observed leadership in mobile phone companies in Bahrain, staffing companies in Kansas City, energy companies in Kenya, and direct selling companies in Peru. And lately, as we all have, I’ve seen dysfunctional and self-serving leadership at the national level that has disgusted me and made me fearful for future generations.

Never has there been such an urgent need for leadership as right now. Many of the readers of InnovationTrends are CEOs and senior leaders of large organizations. This is my call for you to step up to the plate: your company, your country needs you to lead.

And as leaders, you and I face three distinct challenges going forward:

  1. Can we build trust where trust is lacking?
  2. Can we anticipate change and think ahead of the curve?
  3. Can we execute skillfully and turn vision into reality?

Let’s examine these one-by-one:

The first thing leaders must do is build trust.

From the White House to the schoolhouse to the state house and to businesses and nonprofit organizations large and small, followers are asking those in leadership positions: are you the “real deal” and can I trust you? Do you have my back? And can I trust you to keep me and my family and my community safe? Can you steer and navigate this organization to a better place, or will you stand idly by as it is disrupted by forces you don’t understand, and don’t have a strategy to counteract?

The second thing leaders must do is to anticipate future threats and opportunities.

This week I’m interviewing Rick Sorkin, CEO of Jupiter Intelligence, a climate risk startup with headquarters in Silicon Valley, and whose business booked ten times as many contracts in the first quarter of this year as it did in the prior year. “I think that the pandemic was a bit of a near death experience,” Sorkin told the Washington Post. “Once people got past [it], they were like, ‘Oh, what else is there like this that we’re not worrying about?’” Climate change is at the top of that list.

By using advanced computer modeling, Jupiter forecasts the likelihood of a wildfire disaster, or the threat of a flood engulfing your chemical plant. Jupiter offers a whole new level of insight into what might previously have been considered “unforeseen” risks. Post Covid/Post Jan 6 everyone instinctively realizes we are living in a period of ever-broader “unsustainable” risks. Today’s leaders can no longer kick cans down the road. They must lead, for their anticipation skills are on full display. All leaders need to develop and use better tools and methods to help anticipate threats, but also, as Jupiter is doing, to position, wherever and whenever possible to translate them – using creativity and innovation thinking — into opportunities.

The third thing that leaders need to do is to execute successfully and turn vision into reality.

I once interviewed Warren Bennis, the late leadership guru and former president of the University of Cincinnati. Professor Bennis believed in the adage that great leaders are not born but made, insisting that “the process of becoming a leader is similar, if not identical, to becoming a fully integrated human being,” as he put it in an interview with the New York Times. Both, he said, were grounded in self-discovery.

Yet It was Bennis’s definition of leadership that I recall now, as being particularly appropriate to the times we are living in. Leadership, as Bennis saw it, is “the capacity to translate vision into reality.”

And that vision-to-reality transformation is what we need to study now, to celebrate now, and to strive to get better at. Instead of “just getting by” or muddling through, true leaders develop a vision of where they want to take the organization. They study the trends, they look back to be guided by history, and they inform themselves consciously and consistently as to where today’s trends are headed, and they take risks and make investments, rather than merely “kicking the can down the road” for future leaders to deal with.

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7 Trends Driving the Future of Innovation

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7 Trends Driving the Future of Innovation

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

Kraft Heinz’ stock is down 50 percent over the past 12 months, turnover in the executive ranks has increased, and the company’s inability to keep pace with changing consumer tastes is largely to blame. In an earnings call with investors, Kraft Heinz CEO Miguel Patricio observed that “we’ve been too focused on the present, and literally on firefighting. We need to focus on our competencies for the future.”

Yet a newly-released survey of over 200 major companies reveals Kraft Heinz is not alone. While most firms believe they’re “picking up on signals of change” that might disrupt their lines of business, fewer than half (42 percent) admit that they’re unable to act on those signals.

This is but one finding from “Benchmarking Innovation Impact” report, produced by Innovation Leader, an information and research firm in Boston, and sponsored by KPMG LLP. The report is an insightful collection of quantitative data about how big companies staff, structure, and fund their innovation efforts and includes interviews with companies like Google, Cisco, Bose, ESPN, and Capital One.

This year’s report surveyed 215 innovation, strategy, and R&D executives at large companies. To understand how the more sophisticated companies in that cohort were different from the average respondent, Innovation Leader identified a set of “role model” respondents that represented about 12 percent of the complete respondent set. These were respondents who’ve had innovation programs and processes in place for several years, and are starting to produce consistent and concrete outcomes.

Here are seven of the most surprising and counter-intuitive findings from this year’s report:

1. Seeing isn’t the same as doing.

Most companies see and talk regularly about the changes affecting their industry — like fast-moving competitors or changing customer behaviors. But they lack the ability to connect those observations to fast action. Call it the “seeing-doing gap.”

2. Rewarding innovation and innovators will always be a challenge.

Said another way, trophies are OK; time and money are better. The most commonly-used incentive to get employees participating in innovation programs is some sort of award or recognition. (“You get an Apple Watch! And you get an Apple Watch!”) But among the role model set of companies, surveyors found a higher percentage of companies supplementing recognition with dedicated time to continue developing an idea (30 percent) or seed funding (22 percent.) Google’s “20 percent time” for pet projects may be a bit of a myth, but some companies are trying to help employees get the time and funding they need to keep moving their projects forward.

3. Revenue generation is the mother of all metrics.

Among the “role model” set, revenue generated by new products or services was being measured by fully two-thirds of respondents. And 41 percent said they were also tracking cost reductions or efficiencies. It’s not enough just to collect metrics, though — they need to be communicated and disseminated to relevant colleagues up and down the org chart.

4. Recession worries haven’t yet rattled corporate innovators.

Despite stock market tremors, trade disputes, and slowing growth in many parts of the world, more than half (56 percent) of the corporate innovators in the Innovation Leader survey expect their company’s overall investment in innovation to increase from 2019 to 2020; just 7 percent expect a decrease. The rest expect it to remain stable.

5. Leadership support and the right strategy are more important than the ability to accept failure.

There’s been a lot of rhetoric in recent years around “celebrating failure” and becoming more tolerant of failure as a necessary shift, to create more space for experiments that may not pay off. But in many organizations, explaining that it’s OK to “fail fast” is not something the broad employee base is ever going to understand or embrace. The organization’s ability to “accept failure well” was not seen as a key enabler of success by the survey’s “role model” respondents. What was? Support from leadership; crafting the right strategy and vision for the innovation initiative; and assembling a team with the necessary skill sets to deliver on that strategy.

6. Attracting and retaining innovation talent matters.

When respondents are asked to name their biggest challenges, they started with the usual suspects: things like politics, turf wars, lack of alignment, and unidentified “cultural issues.” For most companies, building trust, enabling the right relationships and providing support are necessary pre-requisites to turning ideas into action.

But when surveyors focused on the priorities of the “role model” set of respondents, their top challenge was different: it’s recruiting top talent with in-demand skillsets, from data analytics to complex partnering arrangements with innovation ecosystems. These standout firms made it past the political minefields and are recognizing that having the right people on board are what’s key. Often a mix of company veterans and outsiders with fresh approaches are essential to building new products and launching new business models.

7. Innovators need to learn to just say no.

Previous annual surveys have found program leaders tasked with doing incremental and transformational innovation at the same time. “We run 17 programs in our company and we’re also a skunkworks and we’re supposed to be scouting interesting startups and running hackathons,” said one innovation leader. “We’re being run ragged.”

Attempting to do too much can result in nothing having a significant impact. The researchers recommend putting a stop to projects that are not blossoming and learning to say no to requests that expand the mandate. Kyl Nel, former innovation leader at North Carolina-based Lowe’s, the home improvement retailer, had a clear mandate that steered clear of redesigning the checkout process in the stores, or making forklifts more efficient. “We’re about next generation stuff that’s going to shape the way retail changes,” Nel told researchers in the inaugural report in 2015. Nel had Lowe’s experimenting with mobile robots in the stores and augmented reality as a way to visualize the end result of your home improvement project.

Nel has since left Lowes and joined Singularity University in speaking and writing about transformation. Not an uncommon career path for top corporate innovators, whose tenure is often short.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Innovation Leader

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13 Principles for Navigating the New Decade Ahead

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13 Principles for Navigating the New Decade Ahead

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

In 2009, after a speech at the St. Petersburg International Economic Summit (Russia’s Davos), I wandered into a panel discussion on the topic of trade wars, led by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. My thought was: “why this topic?” Trade wars were not on most people’s radar, certainly not mine.

But the question is: should they have been?

I’ve been ruminating of late about this notion of one’s “radar” in relation to the world of rapid change that we are living in. Looking back at three decades advising companies on innovation strategy, I’ve noticed how little progress has been made in the field of strategic forecasting. Looking ahead at the 2020s, I see a dire need to reinvent the process by which we get to the future first.

In this next decade, businesses and their leaders will rise or fall based on their ability to anticipate and creatively respond to rapid change. That said, how exactly does one “anticipate and creatively respond” to change in an era when so much of what is happening –from the onset of the Global Financial Crisis to the rise of Donald Trump to the outbreak of a trade war with China — seems unpredictable.

Predicting the future will always remain problematic, even with the coming of prediction algorithms. But guidelines in this realm to help us navigate this new and turbulent world of hyper-change are due for improvement. Here are 13 that you may want to consider:

1. Create your own early warning system. Don’t expect others to spot trends, or to recognize threats and opportunities for you. Instead, we must all get better at looking, thinking and acting ahead of the curve. I call this process managing the future, as it combines the tools of technology scouting, forward thinking, competitive intelligence, strategic thinking, and scenario planning.

2. Think like a futurist. Economists primarily track one type of trend: economic. Futurists by contrast attempt to systematically explore predictions and possibilities about the future and how they can emerge from the present. Learn all you can from economists and other specialized experts. But expand your range over the entire landscape of driving forces of change and mega-trends: workplace, demographic, social, regulatory, environmental, geopolitical and technological. Develop insights into each important trend and add insights as you go.

3. Audit your information diet. Read voraciously and widely, and audit your information intake periodically. Move from passively “getting informed” to actively “being informed.” Pay greater attention to the external environment, and to events seemingly on the periphery. When you walk through an airport, ask questions of yourself. Scan the magazine racks for trends and cover story trends. Eavesdrop on the conversations around you. What’s the buzz? When you’re on social media, or sorting through junk mail, look for what’s new, what’s incongruous, exciting to you.

4. Connect the dots. Former Disney futurist Yvette Montero Salvatico uses the analogy of the night sky. As you look up into the night sky, Salvatico advises us to think of the stars as trends. As you look further, you begin to notice constellations as patterns: Ursa Major (the Big Dipper), Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, etc. To manage the future proactively, ponder how the trends interrelate, and focus on recognizing patterns. How you “connect the dots,” and make connections between bits of information requires that you hit “refresh” and maintain an open mind as you consume information. Challenge your own assumptions about where emerging trends are headed, and the implications broadly, and on how you and your organization might best respond.

5. Turn emerging trends into new solutions and adaptations. When Jeff Immelt was fired from his CEO position at General Electric, one criticism was that he “chased trends.” No question, trends can become “bright shiny objects” that some pursue without due diligence. But in today’s world, speed of observation of a trend or development (or threat) and translating that into responsive actions is the often the source of competitive advantage. Innovation means seizing the opportunities that change reveals, taking calculated risks, and translating hindsight, insight and foresight into strategic action. “The best way to predict the future is to invent the future.”

6. Every action you take today shapes the future tomorrow. We must be purposeful in realizing that our individual actions – and time perceptions – create the future. This “spot a change, create a response” mindset will become the touchstone of innovation for the vast majority of businesses, regardless of industry in this new decade. It will affect businesses and individuals over the coming decade.

7. Study companies that “didn’t see it coming,” and were blindsided. The grocery industry “didn’t see it coming” when Amazon jumped into its business with the purchase of Whole Foods, destroying 22 billion in market value overnight. Merced Property and Casualty, an insurance company in Northern California, didn’t see the impacts of climate change coming, when a raging wildfire wiped out 22,000 structures and the entire town of Paradise, California. Unable to pay millions in claims, Merced became insolvent as a result. Or the textbook publisher in Boston who was running a $200 million business unit, when over a three-year period, sales begin to plummet. He, along with thousands of others, were put out of work. Reverse engineer in order to learn from other’s experience, and endeavor to not only “see it coming” but to take responsive action.

8. Practice getting better at predicting. There’s an old Danish Proverb that says, “Predictions are hard, especially about the future.” But not always impossible. Example: I predict that in 10 years you’ll be ten years older. So will millions of other people your age. Demographic trends – ages and life stages — and certain other trends can not only be predicted but projected farther into the future with great accuracy as to what you need to do to be prepared, and to capitalize on trends. The aging of baby boomers means that within just a couple decades, older people are projected to outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history. By 2035, there will be 78 million people 65 years and older compared to 76 million under the age of 18.

9. Look back in order to look farther ahead. On a recent visit to Morocco, I and my fellow travelers learned that the oldest homo sapiens fossil remains are 300,000 years old. This is 100,000 years older than previously believed! Look back to look ahead. Contemplate the future as it appeared to people 30, 300 and 3000 years ago. Read history and biography and talk to wise persons in their 80s and 90s to see into the past more clearly. Looking back makes it easier to look ahead because you have a better sense of what are fads and what are more deep-seated trends. As Churchill put it, “the further backwards you can look, the farther forward you can see.”

10. Dream big. Think big. Contemplating where you want to go and how you intend to get there is time well spent. In fact, it is a hallmark of every successful individual. The power of prospection is what makes us able and willing to look into the future, consciously and unconsciously, and is a central distinguishing trait of us humanoids. Yet modern life crimps our “dream space” and ability to imagine. Set goals and embrace your boldest dreams.

11. Beware the backlash. If a trend or development cannot continue indefinitely in a particular direction, it will reverse course at some point. Sometimes jarringly. The term for this phenomenon is “backlash,” meaning a strong and adverse reaction by a large number of people, to a social or political or technological development. Look for the backlash effect to occur frequently over the next decade, and not just in the arena of politics.

12. Identify cycles in history, in nature, in lives lived. To contemplate cycles — whether economic cycles, business cycles, geological cycles, or monthly cycles (to name only a few) is to literally think ahead of the curve in terms of where this cycle should head next. As talk of an impending economic downturn takes hold in the business world, executives can take thoughtful and proactive steps to help their companies better weather the storm.

13. Disrupt yourself. Disrupting yourself means asking tough questions. If you were attacking you, how would you go about it? To disrupt yourself, break down the essence of your personal value proposition. What’s unique about that value? And most importantly, how are you using your insights into the trends, to add value and differentiate “You, Incorporated.”

The biggest challenge over the next ten years will not be “the future,” but how you navigate your future, and the steps you take to remain relevant.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Pixabay

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Preparing College Students to Innovate

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Preparing College Students to Innovate

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

Several years ago, when my nephew enrolled in business school at the University of Southern California, I asked him to ping me whenever the topic of innovation came up. He pinged very little. As an innovation speaker and expert, I’ve long been frustrated with the lack of innovation in the teaching of this increasingly vital topic. The one course he took devoted to innovation was tedious, taught by a Deloitte accountant.

Organizations need to create cultures of innovation to survive and thrive in the mid-21st century business environment of constant technological transformation and ever-shifting customer demands. Yet half of America’s top colleges still don’t offer courses on innovation. Many that do, teach it from a theoretical perspective.

But now things are beginning to change. As academia is under pressure to become more relevant to what is happening in the larger society.

In 2014, Len Ferman was invited to develop a course on innovation for the University of North Florida. The course has since become something of a role model for other colleges. Ferman is the former head of ideation for companies like Bank of America and AT&T. He sought to design an entry-level course that is light on theory and heavy on practice. His approach gives students a sense of how real world innovators operate. I recently sat down with Len to learn about how he’s innovating the teaching of innovation.

Robert Tucker: Len, you spent 25 years as an innovation manager and a consultant at Fortune 500 companies. So what made you decide to take on this challenge?

Len Ferman: Working in the innovation field taught me to pay attention to gaps and unmet needs. When they invited me to serve as adjunct faculty, I couldn’t help but notice two gaps in the way the subject was being taught. First, the major disciplines including marketing, management and organizational behavior don’t provide a focus on innovation which is cross-disciplinary. Second, most college courses involve one-way teaching. Students listen to lectures, read material and review case studies. My vision was that teaching innovation needed to be two-way. For Millennials and Generation Z, it needed to be an interactive experience in which students become participants. I knew from my work teaching inside big organizations that you really internalize learning by doing.

Tucker: I totally agree, having taught managers the principles of innovation literally all over the world. So what about your corporate work was most helpful in rethinking how to help students become innovators?

Ferman: Over the course of my career, I was fortunate to be involved in all aspects of innovation. I felt I had acquired a clear view of the process. So my vision was of teaching a simplified, step-by-step approach to innovation. Many people talk about the “front end of innovation” where ideas are generated. And a “back end of innovation” where the real work of development and execution take place. I wanted to provide clarity and structure to these innovation phases, so that anyone could grasp them.

Tucker: So take us through your simplified approach to the innovation process.

Ferman: I boil it down to six steps. The first three steps are in the front end of innovation. I call them: Explore, Ideate and Evaluate. You first explore the problem, then you “ideate,” a fancy word for generating ideas to solve the problem. And finally you evaluate your ideas, and narrow down and select an optimal solution.

Tucker: And what about the back end of innovation?

Ferman: The three simple steps here are Design, Develop and Launch. Design is all about the iterative approach of building and testing rapid prototypes with customers. Develop is where you actually build your product, service, program or process that you were designing. And then Launch is where you execute your marketing plan and go to market.

Tucker: I was reading some course evaluations and your students rave about the two-way interactive experience that this course provides. Tell us about that.

Ferman: Young people especially respond to an immersive experience. It enables them to gain an appreciation of the innovation process, and an understanding of the ethos of great innovators. To achieve this, I set up a group project that runs the entire semester. Working in teams, the students select a publicly traded company for which they will fictitiously innovate. For the next three months the students work together through the innovation steps. They take what they learn in each class lecture and then they immediately get to apply it in their teams for their “clients.” I have the teams conduct the first four steps: Explore, Ideate, Evaluate and Design. They finish the semester with a rapid prototype and design plans.

Tucker: How else do you create an interactive experience for the students?

Ferman: I try to keep a good balance between classes in which I’m lecturing to explain the innovation steps and classes in which we are actually working on key aspects of the group project. In this way I can roam the class and actively mentor each team as they are working together. So for example, I have one class dedicated to consumer research in which each team conducts a focus group with another team that serves as their fictitious customers. The highlight of the semester comes during the Ideate phase when each team runs a short brainstorming session leveraging classmates as participants. And towards the end of the semester we hold a design workshop in which each team produces a rapid prototype whether it’s building a physical item with craft materials or simulating a website by developing a set of Powerpoint slides with embedded hyperlinks.

Tucker: You wrote a textbook for the class, “Business Creativity & Innovation: Perspectives and Best Practices,” which I contributed to. Can you describe how the book is different and why it fits the class?

Ferman: The book is an anthology consisting of 25 readings from leading authors, case studies and profiles of innovative companies. It is organized into eight chapters, which follow the steps of the innovation process. Whether the reader is a student or corporate manager, they can benefit from practical innovation principles as well as specific exercises they can implement. For example, the chapter on generating ideas offers many specific creative methods. And the chapter on idea evaluation, which I wrote entirely, lays out my 10-step tournament approach for evaluating ideas. The book is not steeped in theory or definitions. It’s a practical guidebook on innovation.

Tucker: Can you describe the impact that class has had on students?

Ferman: I think this class is definitely making an impact at the University of North Florida. Each semester for the last three years the class has filled in the first three days of registration. That’s a good sign that our students are finding value in the class.

Tucker: How do you think the class can impact students in the long term?

Ferman: The class presents students with a framework for exploring and solving business problems that will be useful in any field. Whether you serve external or internal customers you need to improve that customer’s experience to stay competitive. And long term, when artificial intelligence impacts many traditional jobs, those people skilled in creative problem solving will continue to stay in high demand. I see my class as helping my students be best prepared for success in both the short term and the long term.

Tucker: Thank you Len. I heard from a number of your students and they were all very impressed with what you gave them in this course.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Pixabay

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Seven Ways to Rethink a Leadership Retreat

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Seven Ways to Rethink a Leadership Retreat

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

Each year, thousands of top managers and board members head to the hills for an annual ritual: the strategic offsite retreat. The purpose of such meetings, of course, is to get away from it all and strategize. To leave behind the distractions and quarterly pressures. To think big about the future.

But all too often, that’s not what transpires.

Instead, the future gets drowned out by the present. Presentations run over. Social events and the golf outing seem to always get their due. But the time for connecting the dots, brainstorming and open-ended discussion of threats and white space opportunities evaporates. Before you know it, time’s up. Once again, the future has been postponed.

The danger of postponement is that the world is changing too fast. In my work as a futurist and innovation expert, I see daily how industry disruption can break out at any time. It can be spawned by new technology or regulation, changes in customer buying behavior, or a new competitor entering the market. “We just didn’t see it coming” is not a valid excuse.

If you’ve been tasked with organizing the upcoming offsite corporate retreat, don’t let this opportunity go to waste. You don’t have to jettison the usual agenda. Instead, condense it. Begin with the end in mind. Ask yourself: How do you want everyone to feel, what do you want them to think, and what do you want them to do more of going forward.

Designed well, offsite leadership retreats can end up being transformational moments for the organization. The best ones build trust among top team members and create greater buy-in and alignment around a common vision of the future. Defensively, they can alert the group to significant trends and market developments. Use these seven guidelines to steer your next offsite retreat in a bold new direction:

1. Use the offsite retreat to “future proof” your organization.

“Future-proofing” is the process of anticipating the future and developing methods that minimize the effects of being blindsided by change. One tool I sometimes use to help leaders future-proof their organizations is quite simple. Several weeks before the retreat, I’ll request that everyone come with a list of trends they are seeing: technological, regulatory, societal, workplace, etc. This gets their juices flowing in advance and alerts them to be ready to contribute to a different kind of offsite session.

Then, during facilitated open discussion periods, I’ll use a process such as dot voting to bubble up the most important emerging trends that are worthy of diving deeper. The payoff of this exercise is not trend identification, top people are bombarded with trends daily. Instead, it’s thinking through the significant trends and exploring what to do about or with each trend, that is important. When managers engage in exercises that cause them to wrestle with economic, consumer, lifestyle and technological trends, they often connect new dots and discover exciting ways that trends can fuel growth and competitive differentiation.

2. Use the leadership retreat to identify new technology directions.

In 2009, Domino’s top team came to the realization that they had to leverage technology much better if they wanted to accelerate growth. The result was a renewed determination to employ digital technology to optimize every aspect of the business. Since then, Dominoes has recruited hundreds of tech-savvy engineers to be part of a special tiger team, which has created an app allowing easier ordering, conducted the first drone delivery in New Zealand, and is experimenting with driverless delivery.

This newfound tech push has allowed Dominoes to move ahead of arch-rivals Pizza Hut and Papa Johns, who are now struggling to catch up. No strategic plan is complete without a visionary technology component. Spark fresh thinking in this realm by posing such questions as: On balance, are we leading or lagging on technology? Where do we need to enhance or transform our technology strategy going forward? What customer problems do we need to take on? And how will this technology, if we adopt it, deliver greater value to our customers?

3. Use the offsite meeting to challenge assumptions.

An assumption is a belief that is accepted as true or as certain to happen, without proof to back it up. What was true five minutes ago, may no longer be the case. Assumptions left untested, become like barnacles on the side of a boat– they slow you down, or worse, cause you to miss out on market changes. Transformational retreats occur when executives and managers are invited to wonder anew about the assumptions they have long made about customers, markets, culture, the industry, etc. I ease teams into this mode of thinking gently by first presenting them with compelling future-focused content on how the world is changing. And then I invite them to engage in what I call “playing with the clay.” Assumptions come in three basic varieties: personal (“I’m not creative”); organizational (“that’s not the way we’ve always done it), and industry-specific (“the music industry sells albums”). In a time when today’s business model has a shorter and shorter shelf life, assaulting assumptions is critical and there’s no better time to do this than at a leadership retreat.

4. Use the offsite meeting to tap creative imagination.

IBM did a study not long ago where they asked over a thousand senior managers to rate “what leadership competency do you need more than any other in your people today”? And the answer was creativity. They called creativity the single most important leadership competency in a world that is more volatile, more uncertain, and more complex than ever before.”

My 30-year experience in the innovation field suggests that entire management teams often lack confidence that they can come up with bold ideas to meet their disruptive challenges, much less that they can bring them to life. Many in the managerial ranks got there by being super-competent in their functional arenas but are “fish out of water” when it comes to imagination, innovation, and vision. The task of the facilitator is first to build up confidence that by tapping the group’s creative imagination, to instill the belief that we can solve any problem or issue that we’re facing.”

5. Use the offsite retreat to disrupt your organization.

I’ll often flash a slide on the screen that is filled with the logos of fallen companies: Kodak, Blockbuster, Sears, Nokia, and others. After a pause, I’ll ask the group: “What’s the one thing these firms might wish they’d done more of?” Responses tend to coalesce around the need to look farther up the road. To make tough decisions sooner, and to unleash creative imagination. Of course, these are activities that every organization needs to do, yet few find the time. The retreat is a perfect time. Use it to look at your organization (and its products and services) from the vantage point of the outsider. Ask the group where they would begin to attack it. Where are we most vulnerable? What problems have we not solved for our customers that might cause them to flee to another provider? What alternate business model or value offering (less for less, more for more, same for less, etc.) might attract our customers away? Disrupting yourself in this way helps you make tough decisions sooner.

6. Use your retreat to focus on innovation and white space opportunities.

If the rate of change outside your organization is faster than the rate of innovation inside your company, it’s time to take action. It’s time to figure out what needs accelerating. It’s time to shift from strategic planning (on an annual basis) to strategic thinking, which is ongoing, and needs to be part of the DNA. So-called “white space” opportunities are often assumed to be outside your organization’s walls. But another way of defining them is to see them as those that fall between divisions, where no business unit has clear jurisdiction. Use your retreat to open up the white space of new possibilities, to identify new markets, and new revenue streams from existing capabilities.

7. Use the offsite meeting to take risks.

So, if you’ve been tasked with organizing the retreat this year, why not shake things up a bit? No need to jettison all of the usual agenda. Instead, begin with the end in mind by envisioning the take-away from a successful retreat that has everyone energized and excited. Go through the agenda and condense, tighten up, and eliminate as needed, to make room for the future.

It’s often been said that none of us is as smart as all of us. But that’s true only if we can tap those smarts. Imagine what might happen if you look at your next leadership offsite meeting, not as a “gotta do” ritual, but as a rare opportunity to encourage yourself and your colleagues to look, think and act ahead of the curve.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Unsplash

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Using Consumer Insights To Drive Innovation – Peloton

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Using Consumer Insights To Drive Innovation - Peloton

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

Peloton is the exercise company currently taking the fitness world by storm. The company’s sleek $2200 stationary bikes enable busy professionals to exercise at home, at any hour of the day or night. But that’s not what’s giving the $4 billion unicorn startup so much forward momentum right now.

Peloton’s magic formula turns out to be its superior way of analyzing and aligning with larger lifestyle and technological trends. And using these unique customer insights to solve a problem in a unique and creative way.

John Foley is the hard-charging CEO and co-founder of Peloton, and a serial opportunity spotter. He was formally head of Evite, which revolutionized the invitation business by bringing it online.

Like all innovators, Foley is said to be intensely curious, with his antenna up at all times. His curiosity was initially aroused when he noticed how many stationary bikes ended up in basements and closets, unused, while at the same time time-strapped consumers were spending more time commuting and working longer hours, and lacked the time to hit the gym. Peloton’s big idea was to motivate people to purchase and then use their fitness bikes, and brag about them endlessly on social media. The breakthrough was offering live classes virtually that simulate being at the gym. Peloton users are connected virtually to live instructors leading live classes. And they can see how their performance ranks compared to other participants.

Peloton users don’t have to work out in isolation. They become part of a virtual community of exercisers. Some even get to know their instructors personally and build relationships with others in the class. And Peloton users often find extra motivation to work out by competing with other exercisers spinning remotely in their homes.

Peloton doesn’t see itself as being in the fitness business, which is crowded with competitors. Foley and his team see themselves as being in the fitness experience business, which is distinct and differentiated. Peloton sees itself in the relationship building business as well. Customers get to know their instructors personally and become part of each other’s lives. As they compete with other cyclists spinning remotely in their homes and apartments, Peloton sells the motivation and the energy of a live spin class. And Peloton gains data with which to constantly improve further.

Unlike other manufacturers of stationary bikes, Peloton doesn’t just sell equipment. Using the “razor and blades” business model popularized by Gillette, Peloton sells “razors” (stationary bikes) and “blades” in the form of monthly subscriptions to online classes, in addition to a widening array of new revenue streams to a captive audience. The monthly subscription model entitles users to online classes as well as other classes, from strength training to stretching and high intensity interval routines.

The best ideas seem so simple, so obvious. But in actuality, what Foley and his team did was worth unpacking, for it is the key to success in today’s heavily commoditized world. There are at least fourteen exercise bike manufacturers all competing with each other. But what Peloton did was to resolve a customer contradiction. Peloton’s breakthrough was to “find a need and fill it.” They figured out what was missing from the home exercise bike market — and did something about it that quickly caught on.

What Foley and company do instinctively and habitually you and I can do consciously and deliberately. How? By paying greater attention to consumers, what they buy and why. By paying attention to the rough spots and irksome inconveniences and unmet needs in our daily lives, that someone (maybe you?) might do something about. By invigorating the way we look at trends, we take in more data, and we connect more dots, and visualize new possibilities, new solutions.

This, in turn, stimulates ideas for new products, services and business models that drive growth.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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